FITZWORTH'S FUNERAL
Published 'Stygian Articles' 1996
The city - or was it just a single street? - seemed forever to have a succession of funerals...
Nearly every day or, at least, on alternate days, a fleet of long black cars driven by men in long black coats, emerged, decked in dark flowery wreaths, from the open end of Rackham Road, moving at walking pace into the busy High Crescent.
People wondered whence all the corpses came - because, death by death, the number of mourners never changed.
I was a stickler for old-fashioned ways and often stood to attention at the edge of the pavement, doffing my hat as an act of respect to the newly dead.
Yet, when the older dead actually started emerging in even older hearses - such hearses being horse-drawn with top-hatted capemen striding proudly alongside - even my well-seasoned values became insufficiently respectful. I needed to burnish my shoes every day or, at least, on alternate days, or, perhaps, the left one day, the right the next, so that not only my own face but also God's in Heaven could be reflected in their uppers.
My grief was deep felt. My hat, too.
#
One pair of would-be deaths plodded up Heaven Hill. The last anyone saw of them. The hill incredibly appeared thickly wooded and everybody forgot properly to warn them that it wasn't a hill to Heaven at all.
"It goes on forever, that so-called slope," said an ancient bucket-mender who lived in the last house at Heaven Hill's bottom edge.
"Surely not," was the reply from someone else, but he had taken the words straight from another's mouth.
"Maps can lie, you know. The further you go up, the further you've got to go," the pale oldster continued.
I, whose mouth had been earlier raided for its words, stared up towards the trees and, certainly, the distance stretched as far as any eye could possibly see. And trees in the city were usually far and few between.
"They probably only went up there for a spot of cuddling and kissing," proffered a scandalmonger.
"They'll more likely come back to haunt us with the remains of their bodies," wheedled a scaredy-cat from the corner of a reluctant mouth.
"We can grind their bones to pepper our meals," gloated a scavenger with a turned down smile.
The people round Rackham Road, High Crescent and Heaven Hill were generally set hard against couples coupling, being in fear of dangerous in-breeding. So, the scandalmonger's hypothesis as to simple slap-and-tickle-me-pink, if worrying, made the most comfortable sense.
A little old lady, wrapped in becoming wrinkles, shrugged. She obviously knew more than at which she was willing to even hint.
"How about forming a search party?" another suggested, a nondescript man in mackintosh and yawn.
"A bring-a-bottle party?" shrilled the village idiotess, tightening the bow of her bonnet meaningfully.
"Not that sort of party, silly," sneered the straight man from the jug pub.
I took matters in hand and strode purposefully towards the Heaven Hill. One of the absconding pair in question was my sweetheart, I seemed to recall. The village idiotess followed in my wake, the long full skirt hiding the motion of her legs - as if I were watching a ghost glide.
Arm in arm, the idiotess and I entered upon the woodland slope ... ignoring the shouts of discouragement, shouts that echoed to a silence behind us after the scandalmonger had shouted: "I told you so!"
But I had never been any good with needle and thread.
I suddenly felt that my head had become an empty vessel, the thoughts being expended long before I had thought them, falling off the non-stick brain like dead flies. Or like unknitted stitches.
As we struck the clearing at the so-called slope's top, we could see that a well-shaft stretched like a wall-less chimney of golden light into the sky, with what looked like a lavatory chain hanging down, as if God wanted rescuing by means of it.
"Dob dob dob!" the idiotess urged through a stitched smile. She wormed like a concertina up the chain.
"OK," I answered, pretending to follow her. But I fell back to the ground, watching her legs fast disappear.
I was soon smashed out on the spray from the hip-flask inside the open funnel of her vanishing skirt. But it tasted too much like vinegar and looked too much like something else.
It did not seem to matter, since I was no longer myself, but simply a crazy-paved skull, with sensible thoughts seeping from every crack and different ones creeping back in ... as if my mind were a sponge and my body its holes. Something trailed from the stump of my neck with the tidal motion of flesh - till the scavenger came along and wrapped it in wrinkly brown paper. And all these words were taken from my mouth, after I died.
#
My sorrow, indeed, as well as my hat, was deep felt.
However, I tried to harden my heart. Even my own death should not be sad. I had no children, after all. Even my sweetheart was imaginary, as was my cat's meat business at Rackham Market.
Endless days of such sadness, I knew, attracted wet rot towards my joints. And there seemed no end - indeed there was no end - to the increasingly tragic aftermaths of death. I sensed that everybody was dying and, if I failed to mourn their passing, I would effectively be guilty of their murder. Not paranoia, but more a feeling of fate working through me.
Even worse than the old dead were the toddlers in tiny coffins - being carried by the capemen without recourse to any wheeled vehicle, each with his own personal casket to wield ... a treasure trail, where the treasure was already undug.
I doffed my hat once too often, however. Being a particularly dark day, it was even darker than the night which had preceded it - and I felt as if I were encased in a would-be home that had been condensed from that very darkness.
The hearses were drawn by plumed horses: so many, they kept on and on, turning out of Rackham Road into the High Crescent, with a relentless residue of clopping cobbles to fill out the silence that the darkness otherwise embodied. I tried to peer through the shadow-stained glass in each of the carriages, but all I could manage to see were shapes that were too shapeless to be simple coffins. It must have been the vibration of the horses eventually heaving the hearses up Heaven Hill that caused such indiscernible passengers seemingly to start jumping at my curious gazes - or so I at first assumed. But then, sickenly slow, I sensed something like a soul being hooked from the fast hardening nightsoil of my bowels...
But, if the truth were eventually known, the jumpstart corpses yearned for a fatherhood I had not been able to give them ... as God tugged up the leaden kite of my deep-felt heart upon a long chain. A chap called Fitzworth, wasn't it? A name which, in burnished boots, I proudly called myself, before God took possession of the empty property that was me.
Somewhere, an idiot woman, in odd shoes, sobbed.
END